In an era of Google Maps, our first engagements with places are often anticipated by technology. That is, our experience with a place often comes with pre-emptive associations from aerial pictures -- our possible routes predetermined and mapped; personal narratives and exploration are displaced for utility. So, what happens to our individualized explorations in time and space when GPS technology intervenes? This is the inquiry of GPS artist Jeremy Wood’s body of work and his current show “Mowing the Lawn” at Tenderpixel in London.

Jeremy Wood, Lawn 2005 Scale 1:300, 2010

Treating his body like a “geodesic” pencil, his daily routines are documented as lines in space via GPS technology. In turn, Wood’s performative rituals are data visualized as densely packed line drawings and animations. Having spent ten years developing a system for tracking and translating his everyday movements, the resulting pieces are one part drawing, one part diary and one part critique of the technological system’s accuracy/inaccuracy and how that intervention enables/limits our perception of the spatio-temporal.

What may be more compelling, though, is how a digital trace can bring to the fore the problems of technology. Looking at Lawn 2005 Scale 1:300, we see multiple lines drawn where a house already exists. In Nine Years of Mowing ...

Brighton-based interactive media artists' group Blast Theory posted a call for both their residency and internship program. Interns will have an opportunity to work in Blast Theory's studios on specific projects while residents will be given space to research and develop new work in a supportive and collaborative environment. For the residency program, Blast Theory are looking for individuals working in:

Brian Droitcour is a writer, curator, and Russian-to-English translator. From 2002 to
2007 he lived in Moscow, where he covered art for The Moscow Times and
Artchronika, a Russian monthly magazine. In 2008 he moved to New York,
where he started working for Rhizome, first as curatorial fellow, then
as staff writer. As a translator he's worked on several exhibition
catalogues and art anthologies.

Jon Rafman's Google Street Views and the accompanying essay he wrote for Art Fag City's IMG MGMT series are sure to get several well-deserved mentions in end-of-the-year lists. Tom Moody on Google Street Views: "Jon Rafman's gathering of images from Google Street Views isn't really collecting at all but solid, groundbreaking journalism. Obviously untold hours were spent perusing this recent-but-everyday tool for images in very specific, focused categories. Photos that look like art photos, photos of mishaps, photos showing the success and failure of Google's face-blurring software, photos that show class issues in a supposedly 'universal' product (the down and out are more likely to be photographed unsympathetically than the up and in). As much as one hates to see more attention paid to the monopoly that aspires to put the happy face on Big Brother, this is worthwhile, thoughtful research." Kool-Aid Man in Second Life is a distorted twin to Google Street Views, another set of screen captures singling out accidental beauty and quirks of surveillance, only this time in a fantasy world that lets Rafman personify his searching gaze in a pitcher of fruit drink.

кремль.рф (kremlin.rf) won't go live until early next year, but the Russian presidential administration's new Cyrillic URL already made waves last month, when Russia became the first country to register top-level ...

Created by artist Peter Baldes's Electronic Strategies Class at Virginia Commonwealth University, nonmonument.com is a collection of 3D models tagged with geolocation data and viewed in Google Earth. The project uses Google Earth to introduce impossible and possible interventions and objects in that space, and it plays with the program's claim to represent reality. In a communication with me, Baldes stated that these nonmonuments be thought of "...as real, at their own resolution." He sees the works as a unique form of public art and/or graffiti that "exist in a different layer of our reality." His class has opened up the forum to submissions as well, and visitors are invited to submit their own nonmonument.

The Fragmented Orchestra is a huge distributed musical structure modelled on the firing of the human brain's neurons. The Fragmented Orchestra connects 24 public sites across the UK to form a tiny networked cortex, which will adapt, evolve and trigger site-specific sounds via FACT in Liverpool.

Each of the sites has a soundbox installed, which will stream human-made and elemental sounds from the site via an artificial neuron to one of 24 speakers in FACT. The sound will only be transmitted when the neuron fires. A firing event will cause fragments of sound to be relayed to the gallery and will also be communicated to the cortex as a whole. The combined sound of the 24 speakers at the gallery will be continuously transmitted back to the sites and to each of the 24 sites.

The Banff New Media Institute, ZER01, and the Sundance Institute have teamed up to present a new commission for "Locative Cinema." Selected artist or artists will have the opportunity to realize their project through a residency at the Banff Centre in July 2010. They will also receive funding ($4,500) and will present their work at the 2010 01SJ Biennial from September 15 - 19, the 2011 edition of New Frontier at the Sundance Film Festival from January 20-30, and the 2011 Banff Summer Arts Festival. Read below for a short description of the commission, for more information and to apply, visit the original call on the ZERO1 site.

The purpose of this commission is to use ‘locative cinema’ as an apparatus through which artists can share their vision using place in ways that are both specific and generic, or at least transferable. The Commission understands the notion of ‘locative cinema’ as a platform-agnostic apparatus through which artists share their vision of place. Any variation on how to present an artist’s work will be considered, from cell phones to the black box of the cinema, from mixed reality to street theatre, from GPS to handhelds, from distributed to ambient. Proposals will be evaluated on their ability to engage people using place as a key element of the experience.